Israeli strike kills senior rescue service official in Gaza as fighting rages

[Pelican Press 0]

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******** strike ****** senior rescue service official in Gaza as fighting rages

By Nidal al-Mughrabi

CAIRO (Reuters) -An ******** airstrike on a house in Jabalia on Sunday ******* Mohammad Morsi, deputy director of the Gaza Civil Emergency Service in the northern areas of the Gaza Strip, and four of his family, health officials said.

The Civil Emergency Service said in a statement that Morsi’s ****** raised to 83 the number of its members ******* by ******** ***** since Oct. 7.

There was no immediate ******** comment on Morsi’s ******.

Residents said ******** forces had also blown up several houses in the Zeitoun suburb of Gaza City 5 km from Jabalia. Medical teams said they were unable to answer desperate calls by some of the residents who had reported being trapped inside their houses, some wounded.

“We hear constant ******** in Zeitoun, we know they are blowing up houses there, we don’t sleep because of the sounds of explosions, the roaring of tanks sound close and the drones don’t stop circling,” said one resident of Gaza City, who lives around 1 km away.

“The occupation is wiping out Zeitoun, we are afraid about the people trapped in there,” he told Reuters via a chat app, refusing to be named.

Later on Sunday, the Gaza health ministry said ******** military strikes across the enclave ******* at least 15 people.

Residents of central and southern Gaza areas reported interruption in internet and communication services, which the ************ Telecommunication Company said was because of “the ongoing (********) aggression.”

Palestinians say internet and communication outages, the first in months, impact the ability of medical staffers to dispatch ambulances to bombed areas and make it difficult for people to check on their relatives or report attacks.

******* and ****** continued to blame one another for the ******** of mediators, including Qatar, Egypt and the U.S., to broker a ceasefire. The U.S. is preparing to present a new proposal, but the prospects of a breakthrough appear dim as gaps between the sides’ positions remain large.

Meanwhile on Sunday the ******* Nations, in collaboration with local health authorities, extended by a day a campaign to vaccinate children in the southern Gaza Strip against polio before it moves on Monday to the north.

The campaign aims to vaccinate 640,000 children in Gaza after its first polio case in around 25 years. Limited pauses in the fighting have allowed the campaign to proceed.

U.N. officials said they were making progress, having reached more than half of the children needing the drops in the first two stages in the southern and central Gaza Strip. A second round of vaccination will be required four weeks after the first.

The latest bloodshed in the decades-old ********-************ conflict was triggered on Oct. 7 when the ****** group attacked *******, ******** 1,200 and taking about 250 hostages, according to ******** tallies.

*******’s subsequent ******** on Gaza has ******* more than 40,900 Palestinians, according to the local health ministry, while also displacing nearly the entire population of 2.3 million, causing a hunger crisis and leading to genocide allegations at the World Court, which ******* denies.

The ************ health ministry does not distinguish between combatants and non-combatants in its casualty reports, but health officials say that most of the fatalities have been civilians.

*******, which has lost 340 soldiers in Gaza, says at least a third of the ************ ***** are fighters.

(Reporting by Nidal al-Mughrabi; Editing by Jan Harvey, Alexandra Hudson)

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